The two major Axis powers in both the East and the West had their own atomic weapons programmes and they were maybe more advanced in nuclear technology than we previously suspected; it is possible that Axis scientists even achieved a few nuclear detonations somewhere in the Greater German Reich, though some analysts doubt this.

That being said, it is clear that the Axis still made nowhere nearly enough progress to compete with the Allies, for reasons which are mostly identical in both the East and the West. The first problem was that for at least one year, an Axis victory seemed plausible. This made the Axis’s atomic weapons projects seem exceedingly risky investments that would have taken away valuable resources from more immediate concerns. Consequently, they had much lower budgets than the Manhattan Project.

The next most important reason was the want of materials, notably uranium (some of which Jewish neoslaves might have mined). There was indeed a modest expansion in uranium mining during the Fascist era, and the Third Reich had enough uranium to make one bomb. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that they had enough in 1945 for a bomb ready for deployment in the battlefield instead of testing. Quoting John H. Gill in The Hitler Options: Alternate Decisions of World War II, chapter 7:

Activity at the KAT virtually ceased and, at the end of the month, the Eighth Air Force inflicted another significant loss on the German program by devastating Diebner’s key uranium processing facility at Oranienburg. […] The June bombing raids had cut off the supply of processed uranium, disrupted the plutonium manufacturing process and killed or injured dozens of critical workers. A new DEGUSSA uranium refinery was under construction south of Berlin, but the Oranienburg plant was a near‐total loss and it would take months to repair the KAT.

Due to Allied intervention, the Axis lost a good deal of nuclear materials, at sea and elsewhere. See Thomas Gallagher’s Assault in Norway: Sabotaging The Nazi Nuclear Program for more examples.

Apart from Allied submarines disrupting exports from Malaya, the Eastern Axis’s nuclear programmes did not suffer such a loss of materials, but only because the Eastern Axis had less uranium, and what little that it did have was of low quality. To make matters worse, Allied warfare directly impacted the Eastern Axis’s research, sending many of its institutes up in flames. The surviving scientists consoled theirselves by unintentionally underestimating the time when the Allies’ nuclear weapons would be officially ready for deployment.

In the Third Reich’s case, the white supremacist laws caused many physicists and other researchers (e.g. Nikolaus Riehl) to flee to the future Allied powers. Research on the military potential of atomic energy started off slow because the Fascists were suspicious of quantum mechanics as a ‘Jewish’ science. This xenophobia was only one of the reasons why few scientists were involved in the projects.

Lastly, there was a want of confidence in the scientists theirselves concerning the probability of nuclear weapons; morale was low. The Eastern Axis’s most senior physicist, Hantarō Nagaoka, was the most critical on the very project on which he worked, and he published an article titled ‘A Critique of the Application of Nuclear Fission to Weapons’. For the Western Axis, the situation was little better:

Another problem was the mistrust among supporters and opponents of the [Third Reich]. Some members of the Uranium Club—for example, Schumann, Diebner, and Erich Bagge—were members or followers of the [NSDAP]; others—among them, Hahn, Harteck, Heisenberg, Gerlach, and Karl Wirtz—were not. Everyone who chose not to openly support the régime had to find a way to deal with its factual power.

Heisenberg decided against open opposition, because that would deprive him of any possibility to act and mitigate the consequences of the […] régime ([16], pp. 208–210). After a year‐long investigation ordered by SS leader Himmler with several interrogations at the SS Headquarters in Berlin in 1937, he had no illusions about the criminal character of the régime [27]. And he had to be careful not to cast doubt again on his alleged loyalty to the party line.

As a result of the different individual attitudes, there was, as Wirtz said, no atmosphere of confidence among the participating groups and no trust between the scientists and the political institutions ([28], p. 57).

Some Axis scientists might have even sabotaged the project deliberately, as the Farm Hall tapes suggest. The scarcity of time, money, and other resources sealed the projects’ fates.

Nevertheless, the work continued after 1945: the Zionists probably acquired their nuclear technology from surviving Axis personnel.

See also:

Hitler’s nuclear pile — WWII uranium cube reactor & the Alsos mission: Atomkeller Haigerloch

Secret Nazi nuclear facility found during excavation; Secret Nazi nuclear weapons testing bunker unearthed in Austria

The Uranium Club: Unearthing the Lost Relics of the Nazi Nuclear Program

Uranprojekt: The History and Legacy of Nazi Germany’s Nuclear Weapons Program during World War II